(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com — click link for full-sized image)
__
Now that Senator Elizabeth Warren (I still loving saying that) looks to be joining the Senate Banking Committee, here’s a look back to an interview she did with Charlie Pierce for Esquire before the election:

ELIZABETH WARREN: I think it happened a couple of different ways. One of them was — and I think there was a miscalculation back in 2008, 2009 — a lot of people, at least I subscribed to it, a lot of people thought, Okay, we have 30 years of trying deregulation and to cut taxes and it has brought us to the biggest financial crisis since the great depression. So I thought what would happen over the next 50 years, we’d spend one year rewriting the financial rules and we’d be tough on the banks — as a country, we would be. And then the next 50 years, we’d concentrate on rebuilding America’s working families, creating opportunity and a better middle class, creating these opportunities for kids to rise out of poverty for all of our children to be included, because that’s what we do. I just truly believe that. I looked at that in 2008, 2009 and said, We tried the experiment…. Well, it just seemed so obvious to me! We had tried it, right? Coming out of the Great Depression to basically late ’70s, early 1980s, just almost every piece of legislation that passed through Congress was through the filter of: Does it strengthen the middle class? Does it create more opportunities for working families? And that was the litmus test. That switches in the early ’80s, when the Republican party says the role of government is to protect those who’ve already made it, let them keep more of the money, let them keep more power. And so we tried that for 30 years and ended up with an economy that almost ran over a cliff and crashed into the stone age….

This was not a natural disaster. The crash of 2008 was manmade. And that’s important because it has both halves in it. If we’re not careful, we create more problems,and it also means though it’s within our capacity to prevent this from happening. There were no financial crashes between the 1930s and the late 1980s until the deregulation started again. The relevance of this is what I think is so interesting about this: you know, there was a financial panic. They used to call it “panic,” roughly about every 15 years from the 1790s forward, and it was the insight in the 1930s that we can do better than this. We can put some basic rules of the market: transparency, a level playing field, which were the SEC rules; the FDIC, you know, to make it safe to put money in banks. And we bought 50 years of economic peace. But it’s always the case that the financial institutions, they’re always looking for the chink in the wall. They want everyone else to follow the rules, but, you know: Can they get one little advantage? Can they get one little exception?…

It is also a comfort to me that Nancy Pelosi is still doing her usual fine job of playing Bad Cop for the Obama administration, per Greg Sargent:

It’s a perennial fear among liberals: In the quest for a fiscal cliff deal, the White House and Democrats will ultimately acquiesce to GOP demands to raise the Medicare eligibility age. But one Democrat is drawing a line against this possibility: Nancy Pelosi.

“I am very much against that, and I think most of my members are,” Pelosi said in an interview with me today. “I don’t see any reason why that should be in any agreement.”

The argument against raising the eligibility age is that it would leave hundreds of thousands of seniors without health coverage and wouldn’t raise that much money for deficit reduction, since many of those seniors would go into Medicaid or the Obamacare exchanges, offsetting savings. The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that it would save $125 billion over 10 years.

Pelosi echoed this complaint succinctly, saying: “Show me the money.” She also said flatly that she didn’t believe raising the eligibility age would be in the final deal, despite GOP demands: “I don’t anticipate that it will be in it.”…

**********

What’s on the agenda for another Friday in the post-election, pre-inauguration December doldrums?

@WereBear: She went to Afghanistan and Kuwait and gave a speech at some oil company event. She had a press gaggle before she left and a reporter asked her if she thought global warming was manmade. It was the last question. Her handler pulled after she BS’d through the question(like she had no clue to what she should say) and then walked to the back of the reporter and kind of tapped/lightly punched him on the arm(shades of finger wagging?) and asked him what that question was for. The beeyotch has some alchohol issues. Apparently her nickname around the State Capitol is Otis after the drunk on the Andy Griffith Show.
She is either the only or the only one of two non college educated governors in the country. FYI her last race was against a Harvard educated lawyer, former Mayor of Phx and son of a former governor. My state is the stoopid but not as stoopid as Floriduh. At least we didn’t vote for a Medicare fraudster.

The survey found that “substantial levels of misinformation were present in the daily consumers of all news sources.” But Fox News viewers were significantly more likely to be misinformed than those who get their news from other sources. And, greater exposure to Fox News increased the degree to which viewers were misinformed.

This is not simply a matter of partisan bias. People who vote Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to be misinformed than those who did not watch it – though by a lesser margin than those who vote Republican. Those who got their news from NPR, CNN, or MSNBC were better informed on most – but not all – of the issues in the survey.

Clearly that poll is skewed. If I adjust the results to be unskewed, I bet I get a different result.

Actually that’s a poll where the measurements are skewed because the pollsters are using what “economists” actually say as their ground truth for correctness about the economy. And everyone knows that economists are academics and academics are liberals and therefore birth certificate.

If you polled people and used Fox News at the ground truth for correctness, then the poll would unskew the way it should and show that Fox News viewers are better informed than anyone else.

So the numbers need to be adjusted to better reflect this because as we all know, whenever there is a difference of fact the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Nothing profound to say here, but on Tuesday I flew from Boston to DC, And before the flight I was washing my hands in the ladies room and I looked over at the hand dryer and who is standing there drying her hands but Senator Elect Elizabeth Warren. I blurted some incoherent “Thank you, I am a big supporter” kind of thing, and she said Thank You to me as well. Then she was on my flight, sitting in coach.

Then I got to my conference and Bobo was the keynote speaker. There must be some kind of metaphore for this experience.

When state lawmakers passed a two-year budget in 2011 that moved $73 million from family planning services to other programs, the goal was largely political: halt the flow of taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood clinics.
Now they are facing the policy implications — and, in some cases, reconsidering.
The latest Health and Human Services Commission projections being circulated among Texas lawmakers indicate that during the 2014-15 biennium, poor women will deliver an estimated 23,760 more babies than they would have, as a result of their reduced access to state-subsidized birth control. The additional cost to taxpayers is expected to be as much as $273 million — $103 million to $108 million to the state’s general revenue budget alone — and the bulk of it is the cost of caring for those infants under Medicaid.
Ahead of the next legislative session, during which lawmakers will grapple with an existing Medicaid financing shortfall, a bipartisan coalition is considering ways to restore some or all of those family planning dollars, as a cost-saving initiative if nothing else.

Betty McIntosh: On Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, I was working as a reporter for the Hono­lulu Star-Bulletin. After a week of war, I wrote a story directed at Hawaii’s women; I thought it would be useful for them to know what I had seen. It might help prepare them for what lay ahead. But my editors thought the graphic content would be too upsetting for readers and decided not to run my article. It appears here for the first time.

I really encourage people to take a look at the “III Citidel” crap from “The Best HOA Evah” yesterday. It really illustrates how infantile wingnuts really are.

When I was a little kid, we would dream about our perfect private community. It would probably be a lot like Neverland. Now that I’m older, I see the annoying practicalities? How are you going to fund your own private amusement park and exotic animal zoo? I know! We’ll get a rock star… oooooh… he’s a little molest-y… that’s a downside.

The new Citadel residents will be opening dozens of new businesses – I bet the local papers and radio stations will love the new ad revenue.

Assuming the Citidel doubles the population, what kind of business are you going to open in a place with an average population density of 12ppl/mi2 and a median income of $31K? An Apple store?

One of the locals pointed out that this is a place where people shoot at census workers and a developer was run out of town after trying to get permits to build just 25 new homes. They don’t like outsiders. Of course, the wingnuts are like, “We’re just like you!” Small-town people love to hear that shit. A local responds:

If you think your plan is so great, go out & market it. Anyone can post comments. Take it to the county Commissioners, take out a page in the paper do something other than telling us how great you are and how lucky we will be to have a “few thousand” more people JUSTTTTT like us. But this is our county & we damn well have a right to know what kind of group of people are building what kind of compound here. You want to sell that knock yourself out. :) Ive sent your link to several of my friends here. I got a reply back from one in about 3 minutes “who the f&*k are these people. ya good luck with that

@JPL: My dad came out of the Y in San Diego and the news flashed. He was on a destroyer and they put to sea 12 hours later with some crew members who had been in the Navy for one day. The escorted a carrier to Pearl, the first day of 4 years in the Pacific War.

Good on Nancy. You know it always pisses me off when people talk about raising the eligibility age for social security and medicaid because it makes blanket assumptions just because people are living longer. Its fine if you have had a desk job all your life (like a lawyer for instance) but what about a waitress that has been on her feet for 40 damn years? Or a construction worker? They never seem to take into account that people who do manual labor might want to take a seat on their front porch once they hit 65.

One of the biggest political pleasures of my life was meeting Elizabeth Warren in my town, Hudson, MA, just four days before the election. She’s genuinely a very warm lady and you just got the sense she wanted to go to Washington to do something and not just to be something.

Meanwhile, on the homefront: Here’s my reaction to getting the first professionally-printed and bound copy of one of my novels in the mail. It wasn’t quite what I’d expected.

@Raven: My brother still has the flag from the Nevada. My father was career Navy and retired after twenty-eight years in the service. My parents had five children, some born in VA, some born in CA. After he retired he didn’t speak much of the war at home, although he enjoyed getting together with friends to talk about it.

@JPL: The “Ensign”. My dad was a plank owner from the Crosby, APD 17, tiny little thing in relation to a BB. He was a mustang, enlisted swabbie in WWII, graduated from Illinois and took a commission and went to Korea. He tried to go back on active duty during the Cuban crisis and they told him he was too old. Ornery cuss that he was, he resigned his commission! We lived in Norfolk, North Chicago where he was the Special Services officer for Great Lakes and then California too.

@Raven: That’s neat. I’m going to find my dad’s note because the Crosby sounds familiar although it might be just from reading so much.
He retired when I was in first grade but he made a list for me on the ships he served on and their locations. Now all I have to do is locate it.

My dads brother was standing guard as a US Marine on 12/7. At his funeral a few years back my aunt told us he would get out of bed on December 7th rub his hands together & say “Gee, feels like a little nip in the air today”. He thought that was hilarious.

She also told us that he stood guard after the attack & could hear guys tapping SOS from the sunken ships. I can’t imagine how that would screw with your head to have to hear that & not be able to do anything about it.

For those of us who eagerly wish for the demise of Kaplan Test Prep Daily and its now irredeemably toxic contribution to national political discourse, this is a report to break out the hats and hooters.

Because a business model that suggests that profitability will result from having online readers pay for the swill of Krauthammer/Will/Gerson/Lane/Rubin/Samuelson/Marcus/Cohen/Kagan/Thiessen/Hiatt et al as well as to increase the cost of the daily print newspaper at a time of plummeting sales and subscriptions is an invention of sheer genius to expedite that desired result.

Put this once proud and vital newspaper out of its misery as fast as possible.

@PeakVT: good use of our taxpayer dollars there…. and they complain when Obama returns to Hawaii for a vacation… sheesh. Maybe she was looking for a good place to deposit Sheriff Joe, I imagine he would do well in Karzai’s regime.

Warren will be one of the new faces that makes me really look forward to the next congressional session. Fewer Blue Dogs, definitely fewer ‘Thugs.

The President has stated he will not play hostage-taking with the debt ceiling, but has not said what he’ll do instead. He won’t invoke the 14th Amendment, and the trillion-$ coin idea is more stunt than policy (not to mention a truly horrible precedent; imagine if Dubya had pulled something like that). The best guess offered is that he’ll go ahead and shut down most government functions.

In view of what the 113th Congress will be like, I wonder if that is the idea. Let the 112th usher itself out as *the* most destructive, nihilistic Congress since the pre-Civil War era. Let the GOP own that dead horse… and then see what the new Congress is made of.

Hey! If you thought 112 was bad wait until you see what 1-1-3 can screw up!

Not sure if its been mentioned here & I missed it but there is a move active to get Boner tossed out. I forget the group but they claim they have some members of the clown posse that will vote ‘present’ rather than for Boner there by not letting him be Speaker. They have no alternative planned so you know this will go great for them.

They are much not happy with TruConservs(TM) not getting plum assignments

@Litlebritdifrnt: Or nurses or firemen or policemen. One of the pension funds for the nurses around here went belly up when Lehmann Bros. crashed, and many nurses who had been retired had to go back to work to make ends meet. A neighbor who was a surgical nurse told me she thought it wouldn’t be too bad, but at 73 to stand for the length of some of those procedures was very difficult.

The latest Health and Human Services Commission projections being circulated among Texas lawmakers indicate that during the 2014-15 biennium, poor women will deliver an estimated 23,760 more babies than they would have, as a result of their reduced access to state-subsidized birth control.

Exactly there is a real difference between occupations but the people spouting the “raise the retirement age” never take any of that into account.

Also it has always been a little suspicious to me that every time the life expectancy of black males goes up they somehow magically raise the retirement age to that age. Poor sods end up working all their lives to keep little old white ladies comfy. (And I am a little white lady getting older by the day).

I suspect that this is actually news to the Texas wingnuts. They genuinely believe that poor people are just moochers who could afford X if they weren’t dead set on getting it for free. Discovering that taking something away from them actually makes them go without rather than magically getting the resources to pay for it themselves is genuinely news to them.

The great loss would be access to Dana Priest, the best investigative reporter employed by any newspaper in this country. Also I would miss reading Harold Meyerson, a great and greatly underappreciated columnist who writes almost exclusively about labor and working/middle-class economic issues.

Greg Sargent has become a reliably shrewd and well-sourced political analyst but he may migrate to another publication. Rumors persist that Ezra Klein will depart to host a MSNBC program.

As for Eugene Robinson, frankly I consider him a fickle and shallow advocate of liberal causes and positions. His Kaplan columns strike the right notes, but when given an opportunity to amplify those views to a wider television audience his remarks, both in substance and style, seem tailored to the prevailing opinion in the studio. A very different Eugene Robinson appears among the Sunday morning bobble-heads, the Morning Joe frat crew, or as a comrade of Rachel Maddow.

…and the trillion-$ coin idea is more stunt than policy (not to mention a truly horrible precedent…

Nonsense.

First, it’s certainly a radical policy, but one necessitated by a radical faction.

Second, radical does not equal horrible. AFAICT, all that happens is that federal debt held by the fed is replaced by a token. It’s not like the resulting “money” is somehow dumped into circulation. (Not to mention that the relationship of the money supply to “government printed” money empirically appears much more subtle than textbooks would indicate.)

The total amount of federal spending would still be set by Congress anyway, which is a key point in this whole screwup to begin with.

It’s not like the resulting “money” is somehow dumped into circulation.

And so what if it were? It would be absolutely great if we could get drive inflation up from where it is right now. Inflation moderately above the 2% long-term target would be just the thing to help debtors, discourage businesses from sitting on giant cash hoards, and drive down the dollar to make our exports more competitive on the global market.

There is a story from COrregidore of a handful of ships cooks (so they would have been black though its never mentioned in the stories) that drove an entire company of Japanese Marines off the beach with a bayonet charge.

But you know, them coloreds won’t fight a lick – thats why we can’t have them in combat units

The problem with driving up inflation right now is that it would devalue wages even more. After 30 years of no gains we would slide backwards even faster.

Normally I would agree that the tiny rate of inflation we have had for 30 years could easily be bumped up. But worers have not gotten a dime of the increased productivity over this period so it would hit us harder